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In
the far flung future of 2041, mounting
tensions between the United States and the
Soviet Union found the cold war turning
hot, bringing the world to the brink of
war for the fourth time.
World
War III, a non-nuclear affair, was a brief
skirmish where the entire forces of NATO
beat senseless the Totalitarian Regime of
a small Caribbean Island, thus making the
world safe for democracy. Communist
sympathizers say the government wasted 50
billion dollars overrunning two farmers
and a cow. (But
the President insists that is was two
farmers, a cow, and several unruly
chickens.)
Tensions
were running high after the incident, and
things escalated quickly from embargoes, to
sanctions, to the full commitment of both
super powers' nuclear arsenals.
They
say the whole thing was almost prevented,
but then the Yakoff Smirnoff defection was
the straw that broke the Bolshevik's back.
There
were also unsubstantiated rumors that
the whole thing was an accident, caused
by some punk kid hacking into NORAD’s
defense systems. He was quoted as
saying, "I just wanted to play
tic-tac-toe! I knew I shouldn’t have
played hooky from school. It’s all
Cameron’s fault!" before being
feed to a pack of rabid badgers.
Our
sci-fi opus begins ten years after the
bombs we’re dropped. Our protagonist,
Bob (Robert McKenzie), was
off planet while it was nearly destroyed.
Luckily, there are few pockets of
civilization remaining. He hooks up with
base Alpha. (Alpha is somewhere in
the ice fields of the Yukon. Beta is in
the Australian Outback and Gamma, oddly
enough, is right outside Des Moines,
Iowa.) Now that the radiation
levels have died down, the first priority
is to scour the countryside for provisions
and find a more suitable spot for
civilization to start over.
And
that's not as easy as it sounds. Alpha
Base is near the mysterious Forbidden Zone,
where it is rumored that survivors of the
war roam the countryside, looting and
pillaging. Mutated by the radiation from
the bombs, their heads have become
grotesquely fleshy, with huge sores and
pustules protruding over their eyes.
Making
his way to the ocean, Bob finds himself
longing for a simpler time before the war.
He waxes nostalgic for things like
recreational facilities. (Bowling
alleys, bars etc.) Really
depressed, Bob contemplates seeking out
some alcohol to drown his sorrows. While
looking, he spots something in the rocks
and finds a busted Statue of Liberty
souvenir. So overcome by the fact that
these brazenly materialistic things, like
cheap souvenirs, and collector plates, will never
be again, he breaks down and cries.
Bob
manages to pull himself together and
decides to confront the unknown, head on.
Mounting his hi-tech land
rover/hovercraft, he probes into the
Forbidden Zone. He approaches sector 16-B (formally
known as South Dakota) and detects
something moving on his scanners.
He
barely has time to dismount before he's
surprised by a mutant (Douglass
McKenzie). Bob draws his plasma gun
but doesn’t fire, because the mutant
doesn’t attack. Curious, he cautiously
approaches the hideous thing and tries to
make peace. He
gives a friendly query only to be quickly
rebuffed by the "genetic freak."
The mutant states that there can never be
peace because of what mankind has done to
him and the other mutants. He will always
consider himself an enemy of civilization,
and they will not rest until all of
humanity is destroyed. (The
mutant believes that if mankind is allowed
to rebuild, they’ll only build bombs
again, keeping the vicious cycle going.)
Disheartened,
Bob retreats and informs Base Alpha of the
hostile mutant’s intentions. The
creature commandeers his land
rover/hovercraft. Bob fires several rounds
from his plasma gun; to his dismay, the
creature appears to be immune to the
blasts as the energy spheres only bounce
harmlessly off the mutant's thick skull.
Bob
cranks up the power settings on his gun --
but before he can fire again, the film
breaks and we are left to stare at a white
screen.
The
End
You
have to give the McKenzie brothers some
credit. The co-writers, directors,
producers, and actors have a lot of balls
to end their first film effort like that.
Usually I don’t buy into these
nihilistic visions of the future, but this
film was so powerful with its message of
utter hopelessness, that it really
couldn’t have ended any other way.
There
is a strong influence of Richard
Matheson’s I
Am Legend
-- a tale of the last survivor on Earth
fighting off vampire mutants. It’s been
adapted to the screen, several times, most
notably as a vehicles for Vincent Price, (The
Last Man on Earth)
and Charlton Heston (The
Omega Man).
The
McKenzie’s substitute nuclear war for
the plague, as the cause of Earth’s
downfall, but the novel’s overtones are
still there. In fact, the character Bob
makes several pop-culture references to himself,
a prerequisite in films these days it
seems, that he is just like Charlton
Heston in The
Omega Man.
There
is also a nod to Star
Trek
as Bob’s uniform resembles an old Star
Fleet uniform. Bob is a big William
Shatner fan and allegedly disdains The
Next Generation,
and considers it sacrilege. In fact, they
tried to get Shatner to play the mutant,
but conflicts with the shooting schedule
of T.J.
Hooker
could not be resolved; so Doug took the
role instead.
Some
people complain that the film’s special
effects aren’t up to par. Well, this
little independent film probably
couldn’t afford ILM and had to make do
with what they had. Aside from it’s
crappy title card and opening credits (it
looks like someone made it with a piece of
cardboard and a Sharpie), the
effects aren’t that bad. And who’s to
say that after a nuclear holocaust that we
won’t be modifying tape measures into
communicators, and ping-pong guns into
weapons of mass destruction?
Does
Mutants
of 2051A.D.
belong in the same breadth as 2001:
A Space Odyssey
and The
Thing from Another World as Science
Fiction gold? I think so. Others may
disagree. To those I say watch it again --
preferably
the letterboxed director's cut on DVD,
with the director’s commentary turned on,
and then reconsider your opinion.
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